Ralph Lemon/Cross Performance

Ralph Lemon (Creator, Choreographer and Director) is a director, choreographer, writer, visual artist and curator, and the Artistic Director of Cross Performance, a company dedicated to the creation of cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary performance and presentation. His most recent works include the innovative dance/film project Four Walls (2012), and How Can You Stay in The House All Day and Not Go Anywhere? (2008-2010), a work with live performance, film and visual art that toured across the U.S. The immersive visual art installation, Meditation, which was part of How Can You Stay…, was purchased for the permanent collection of the Walker Art Center in 2012. In January 2011, a re-imagined section of How Can You Stay… was performed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in conjunction with On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century. Mr. Lemon curated the fall 2012 performance series Some sweet day at MoMA, and the acclaimed 2010 performance series I Get Lost at Danspace Project in NYC.

Mr. Lemon’s visual art work was shown in a group exhibit When the Stars Begin to Fall: Imagination and the American South at the Studio Museum of Harlem (summer 2014). His solo visual art exhibitions include: 1856 Cessna Road at The Studio Museum in Harlem, NYC (2012); How Can You Stay In The House All Day and Not Go Anywhere?, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2010); (the efflorescence of) Walter, Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans (2008), The Kitchen, NYC (2007) and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2006); The Geography Trilogy, Zilkha Gallery at Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT (2001); and Temples, Margaret Bodell Gallery, NYC (2000). His group exhibitions include: When the Stars Begin to Fall: Imagination & the American South, The Studio Museum in Harlem; Move: Choreographing You, Hayward Gallery, London, UK and The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl, Nasher Museum at Duke University, Durham, NC. Mr. Lemon’s book, Come home Charley Patton, the final in a series documenting The Geography Trilogy, was published in 2013 by Wesleyan University Press.

In 2012, Mr. Lemon was honored with one of the first Doris Duke Performing Artist Awards; he was also one of the first artists to receive the United States Artists Fellowship (2006). He is recipient of two "Bessie" Awards (1986, 2005); two Foundation for Contemporary Art Awards (1986, 2012); two New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships (2004, 2009); a 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship; a 2004 Bellagio Study Center Fellowship; and the 1999 CalArts Alpert Award.

Mr. Lemon has been an IDA Fellow at Stanford University (2009); artist-in-residence at Temple University (2005-06); Miller Endowment Visiting Artist at the Krannert Center (2004); Fellow of the Humanities Council and Program in Theater & Dance at Princeton University (2002); and Associate Artist at Yale Repertory Theatre (1996-2000). For the fall 2011 semester he was a Visiting Critic with the Yale University, School of Art, Sculpture Department. Currently he is the 2013-14 Annenberg Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art, where he has curated a series of “performance essays,” titled Value Talks.